After hearing Strictly Leakage, it seems like you and ANT definitely wore your influences on your sleeve—from the Willie Mitchell sample to the G Rap cover. That record shows a certain side of you I think.
Sure. Everything kind of went towards the direction of “lets just kick beats and rhymes”, which I think also allowed ANT to kick some throwback shit too. Then I just followed suit with what he did with the production. We didn’t intend for it to be a homage. We did a cover of that Kool G Rap joint and ANT told me to do “Young, Gifted And Black” by Big Daddy Kane too, and I was like “yes, let’s keep it comin’, this is fun”. Should we just turn the whole project into covers? We thought “no” because there were already so many great beats ANT already made that weren’t covers, so we just sprinkled a couple in there to let people know where we came from without being corny or cliché about it.
It wasn’t meant to be a throwback record, it was meant to be a party record. You might have noticed that every beat has crowd noise in it. We only fucked with beats with crowd noise so that it feels like there’s a perpetual crowd for those 45-minutes. And since Strictly Leakage wasn’t a mixtape or a real album, it’s the place where I could do my fun covers too.
Were you tryting to school younger cats in a way? Or was that unintentional? You covered Ice Cube too—talk about Cube a bit.
I have fans that are fifteen and sixteen-years-old that don’t even know that “Road To The Riches” ain’t my song. And I just hope that they’ll Youtube it and get the G Rap version. It’d be cool if some kids discovered G Rap though me, not that I’m huge or anything, or that everyone would hear my version first or anything, just sayin’. And yeah, that Ice Cube joint was just fun! Cube was one of my favorites. After Death Certificate, I was like this dude is in the top five for sure. So we put those three covers on there.
Seems like you particularly dug the late ’80s era.
‘86, ‘87, and ‘88 was the shit for me. I mean, everything was moving. We had a local radio show here in my city called “The Hip-Hop Shop” and every weekend you could listen to it. Every weekend it felt like something was happening, that someone was adding something new to this movement. It’s when I discovered Ultramag, and a week later I’d discover Eric B. and Rakim, and a week later I’d discover Boogie Down, and a week later it was someone else! It was almost like that shit was set up so everyone had their own week. And it stayed like that all that way up until NWA.
Did other kids in your area seem similarly affected?
Yeah, man. I mean, you could bump into a complete stranger at school, someone you never spoke to before, and if you were into hip-hop, you had this bond and could discuss it, and other kids could never take that away from you. And granted, we’re from Minnesota so we already felt like outsiders. We didn’t feel like hip-hop belonged to us, we felt like we were taking part in something that belonged to other people. But that made us take it more serious, and study it more, and treat it like the beautiful thing it was.
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